The Information Commissioner’s Office has found that more local authorities have breached the Data Protection Act, reports The Register. Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council breached the Data Protection Act four times in 2011 and in July 2011, a member of staff at Brighton and Hove council e-mailed personal details about another council employee to 2,821 council workers.

Ticketing agent TicketWeb says it is investigating an online attack which saw an ‘unauthorised party’ contact their customer database and ask them to click on a software update. According to a BBC News report, TicketWeb says customers’ credit card information was not ‘vulnerable during the attack’.
Security: Mobile platforms make stealing trade data easier

What might have once sounded like the behaviour of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for some smartphone owners, reports The New York Times. It has become easier to steal information remotely because of the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones and the inclination of employees to plug their personal devices into workplace networks and cart proprietary information around.

Hackers in Brazil linked to the Anonymous collective have crashed websites belonging to a raft of the country’s leading banks, including Banco de Brasil and Citigroup. According to a Finextra report, Anonymous Brazil claimed on Twitter that it was targeting the banks with denial of service attacks as part of a crusade against corruption.

An Anonymous-related Twitter channel has claimed that the group had successfully taken down the CIA’s public-facing website, notes an Information Week report. The CIA website reportedly remained inaccessible several hours after the attack in the face of what appeared to be a distributed denial of service attack.